Soooooo, for a long time I’ve had a deep and abiding love of all the pretty of high glamour frocks – which I gleefully embrace this time every year as the Hollywood Award season hits its stride.
And today the interwebs have been flooded not with the usual rainbow of colour but instead the politically charged statement black as the women of the (predominantly) western film and TV industry gather together with allies to say Time’s Up on sexist injustice and inequality.
At work we’ve been getting our brains into gear for how we’ll celebrate International Women’s Day and we’ve been talking about the importance of women’s leadership, but not just women’s leadership, feminist leadership. Leadership that has at heart the need to transform these everyday, ever minute gender norms that say what power is and isn’t.
What looks like power. What moves like power. What speaks with power.
Still, today, our default is the male body.
Think about how Hillary Clinton was censured for raising her voice, when that rising cadence of political speech making, that getting louder, getting louder incitement depends on volume.
We’ve been talking about those short term steps you put in place to address centuries of imbalance: what are known in the business as temporary special measures. Around the world, imbalances in parliamentary representation have been turned around when quota systems have been introduced.
But there’s a thing about quotas, they can’t be piss weak. You’ve got to go hard or go home. A single seat in a legislature achieves very little. What you need is a QUOTA that delivers critical mass. And you’ve got to build in cultural transformation programs that pick up every rock and peer into every crevice to see how the institution backs the status quo of man=power, and then rebuild so that human=power.
And, more than the black frocks, what struck me about the Golden Globes today is the power of a critical mass of women transforming traditional constructions of leadership. New models of leadership and solidarity.
From reports it seems that the It’sTime movement is another one of these sparkly moments for change that exists in lounge rooms/break rooms, with women gathering together to bring about change in the margins of their days. And while we want our labour to be properly valued, we’re not there yet, and this is a start.
There is no one leader, there are many. Without title, but with sleeves rolled up, these women are getting on with reshaping the gendered and raced and classed power dynamics of their industry.
It manifests in the activist “plus ones”. It speaks to the intrinsic intersectionality that has seen money being gathered for legal defence funds for women in low paid industries: the learning and listening that sits behind that is evident.
It sounds like women, pissed off that a pussy-grabber was elected President, speaking truth to power (and check out Oprah’s speech) and saying to the world at large: come on, we can do better than this. While our institutions have been temporarily co-opted, we’ve got work to do outside and inside to get our country back on track, and reassert the principles of social justice that are necessary for a healthy and functioning society.
It looks like men stepping back, fading into the background, for now. Ensuring that their It’sTime pins speak more than they do. In time, when we’ve done the hard work of redress, we’ll get to the point where we have equal voice. But we’re not there yet, and so this step back is necessary.
It bubbles up in the unbridled joy of women being photographed as a collective, eschewing the traditional stand-alone glamour shot or two-by-two pairing of couples in favour of shoulder-to-shoulder, sister-to-sister power.
Look, I’m not saying this is perfect. But, my friends, this collective roar is what transforming gender norms starts to looks like (albeit in makeup and still mostly high heels….one dismantling at a time – unless of course you’re Frances-trend-forward-nary-a-skerrick-of-makeup-picking-up-the-gong-for-best-actress McDormand).
Stardust Becoming 